Halestrom.net

Neanderthal diagnosis techniques lead to a simple and complete repair.

3 consecutive disk failures in 3 months.

A brief analysis of the Kicad source files.

This was a big brain twister.

Heavily improving my webcam and desk lighting adjustability.

For when your cabling is cursed by the light touch of a thousand techs.

Tunnelling Imapcopy traffic over TLS and everything that went wrong for me.

The indoor air quality industry is completely broken.

Replacing wifi coax, modifying bios to allow new wifi cards, unsticking tired clock chips, DIY custom power suppy plugs, de-flickering backlight and more.

Includes amusing stories about teaching and learning.

Designs & discussion about a discrete audio amplifier, including some musings on SPICE electronics sims and my tips for etching PCBs at home.

A reply to Ross Scott's "The Software of my dreams" video, on capturing game 3D worlds so they can be explored in different ways.

Ionic diodes, failures in researching potential transistor-like devices and misdirection in transistor proofs.

General appreciation + lots of bugfixes and security enchancements in Minisleep

Low power amp-in-a-box, showing off some more messy copper-tape construction.

A simple little box that defeats the ferrous furries.

Trying more techiques than traditional proto/vero/strip board has made things much easier, especially with SMD parts.

Fake greymarket parts, home chip decapping and a borrowed microscope.

A bucket and a $50 bagged vacuum cleaner make a bedroom that no longer snows dust.

Why I don't like people claiming you should not start new projects in C

Tales of converting bash to POSIX shell scripts and a picture of my new crazy software sideproject.

A tiny wiki engine, designed out of frustration of the other options.

Replacing self-annihilating fans and reverse-engineering console cables.

My experiences with various homebrew antennas and wifi chipsets.

Finding and testing alternative web browsers and email clients to Seamonkey.

Comment systems on self-run sites: methods, security, what I've found so far.

Over the years I've dabbled making lots of small games, but I've always been afraid to release.

'HID' stands for 'Human Interface Device'.

Modding a LTC3780 board to use different pots, toroidal transformer rewinding and a bit of bodging gone wrong.

I've made something interesting with my aluminium and soda bicarb diodes: a 7-segment display encoder.

Putting a Pentium 4 rig, power supply and all, on piece of plywood for easy hanging.

My first time-keeping device, using a stepper motor to control the main wheels and mains frequency counting circuits to keep the time.

We're back in the lab trying some new combinations and methods to make diodes.

Or "how I managed to do it without cutting open the lipos with a knife" this time.

An unrelated fuse blew in another multimeter, so I decided to buy some replacements for these white ones too.

It turns out that red COB leds have blue LED dies in them.

Problem: agressively clicking noises on startup lasting most of a minute.

Method and results for a few different techniques.

Making copper-clad board substitute using aluminium foil and silicon caulk, then etching it.

Upcoming posts (hours, days), possible changes to the site

Basket-woven 10-winding AM loop antenna for my radio.

A selection of things I've made over the past several years.

My method and my results.

Trying out new distros: gentoo and Void.

I buy electronics on the cheap.

Atom feed dates and duplication, thumnails and post summaries.

Quick repair.

After years of usage my laptop has taken a bit of a beating.

Why I want to abandon my current distro and move to another.

Fabricating aluminium wheel adaptors from scratch.